The Seven Are The Highest-Earning Superheroes In "The Boys"
In the world of The Boys, superheroes are big business. While Homelander and The Seven pretend to protect the Earth from alien invasions and powerful supervillains, mostly they just hang out in their satellite clubhouse, wasting their time engaging in whatever extreme debauchery their extraordinary Wealth and privilege allows them to get away with.
The Boys – created by writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson – effectively folded its critiques of the superhero genre and the comic book industry into one another, by having the series' supes profit off content and merchandise produced using their likenesses.
Assessing The Figures
Though there was only so much room in The Boys' high-octane story to get caught up in hard facts and figures, Garth Ennis did offer a clear sense of The Seven's extravagant Wealth, albeit through tidbits dropped throughout the series. One prominent example came early in the comic's run, in The Boys #4, when Starlight sat in on one of her first important meetings – which turned out to involve bickering over the percentage of merchandising each hero receives.
In the scene, it turns out that Homelander, Queen Maeve and Black Noir receive 1% of merchandising profits, while the rest of the heroes – A-Train, Jack from Jupiter, the Deep, and Starlight – get 0.75%. Given the franchise is full of movies, action figures, comics, and live appearances celebrating each hero, the implied difference here is a matter of tens of millions. Whatever the precise figure, The Boys makes it clear that the Seven are the biggest-earning superhero team in the world, followed by the G-Men.
Money Was Just One Aspect Of Garth Ennis' Study Of Excess
While it is a worthwhile exercise to extrapolate potential numbers from the information given in The Boys, it is also important to focus on the role the Seven's wealth played in the series' satirical project. The Boys is – first and foremost – a study of the alienating effect of power.
Garth Ennis primarily uses superpowers as the mechanism for his critique, but the other, more traditional forms of power that supes such as Homelander cultivate add an important dimension to the story. It speaks to the idea that power compounds; The Boys' supes use one form of power to acquire status, which in term lets them acquire wealth, which gives them more power. This is a real-world cycle that Garth Ennis injected superpowers into with The Boys, but his depiction of how superpowered individuals would use their wealth and status reflects a harsh view of real rich and powerful people.
Amazon's "The Boys" TV Adaptation Offers More Clarity On How Wealthy The Seven Are
Amazon's The Boys television adaptation, naturally, engages with the same themes of its source material, though at times it approaches them from a revised angle. One way the series has brought fans a greater sense of clarity about the world of The Boys has been with its own references to the financial status of its supes. As with Garth Ennis' original comic, the on-screen version of the The Boys emphasizes the alienating effect of power on individuals, as part of its exploration of the psyches of many of its characters.
In one particularly noteworthy dialogue exchange from The Boys TV show, the hero known as Nubian Prince is said to be contracted to serve as Baltimore's hero, for a sum of for $230 million, suggesting a pay scale for heroes in the TV continuity that would put the Seven in the high hundreds of millions by comparison. It is therefore conceivable that the Seven would be worth around a billion dollars each – at least in the case of what the comics call the 'Big Three.'
Details Make Satire Richer
Ultimately, The Boys is about horrific corruption. The corruption of individuals by power, as well as the corruption that takes place when corporations run rampant in the name of profit. In this context, it makes sense that Homelander, Black Noir and Queen Maeve are pulling in close to one billion just for existing.
In the world of The Boys, they are the most valuable commodity, and have diverse interests in a wide set of industries, from entertainment, to defense and technology. This is an essential aspect of The Boys as Satire, making every detail the franchise is incredibly valuable.
